youth crime enforcement bias

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

from today's SLATE Magazine: >The NYT off-lead, by the paper's national
crime reporter, Fox Butterfield, a story nobody else fronts, is that a new
comprehensive study purports to show that black and Hispanic teenagers are
treated more severely than their white counterparts in the juvenile justice
system. Findings include: "Among young people who have not been sent to a
juvenile prison before, blacks are more than six times as likely as whites
to be sentenced by juvenile courts to prison." And: "Similarly, white
youths charged with violent offenses are incarcerated for an average of 193
days after trial, but blacks are incarcerated an average of 254 days and
Hispanics are incarcerated an average of 305 days." The story says that
although in the past, when studies have found racial disparities in say,
the number of inmates, critics have said the cause was simply that
minorities commit a disproportionate amount of crime, this study is
different in that it finds disparities at each stage of the juvenile
justice process. This would be important and disturbing news, which is why
it's important journalism to run down some issues the story seems to leave
untethered. For instance, as regards that trans-racial comparison among
people who have not been sent to juvenile prison before, has it been
adjusted for equal numbers of prior convictions and for equal seriousness
of the crime? If not, then it may be the prior number of blown chances and
the gravity of the crimes that are pushing the offender into prison for the
first time, not his/her race. A similar point can be made about violent
offenses--they come in degrees of gravity and if one group's offenses
cluster around one degree of gravity and another's cluster around another,
then the difference in jail time served may be an artifact not of race but
of the type of violent crime committed. Even the study's claim that
"minority youths are more likely than their white counterparts to be
arrested" needs more exegesis than the Times gives it here. If somebody
isn't arrested, how do we know he's in any relevant sense a "counterpart"
of the person who is? Maybe he's law-abiding, in which case his not being
arrested isn't prejudice, it's justice. <

I'm no expert on these statistical issues, but I'd like to here from
someone who is.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine